(10 of 10)
For the moment at least, Moynihan professes to be content to be the man who loosened up and livened up the U.S. posture in the U.N.—an effort that for him begins at home. One recent morning, the ambassador was chatting with visitors while padding barefoot around his Waldorf Towers suite dressed in a tatty gold dressing gown with a loose thread hanging from the sleeve. Sitting down in the armchair beneath his Custer painting, he began going over the wire traffic from Washington with a couple of his assistants. "Oh, God," he exclaimed, as another State Department memo was put in front of him. "If you read enough of this stuff, your mind turns to mush!"
On another level, Moynihan hopes to win Americans who are disillusioned by the tougher climate for U.S. diplomacy in the U.N. (as elsewhere) back to a recognition that "ideas matter in world affairs." He adds that in much of the world of the 1970s, with its new nations and new political perceptions, "ideas, just now, are all against us." But that is all the more reason, in Moynihan's view, why Americans should begin to pay more attention to their own ideas, including the increasingly rare faith in political and economic freedom that makes the U.S. what he calls "the liberty party" in the world today. Thus as the Ambassador sees it, his mission at Turtle Bay is not just to raise hell in the U.N., but to give other Americans something to think about.
* Unfortunately, the German vocabulary offers no more precise term for the meaning of detente. The closest approximation is Entspannung which, like detente, means a relaxation of tension.